David Phipps

Engineering leader and innovator with deep technical skill. Large company and startup experience. Security expert with SOC2/GDPR/FedRAMP production knowledge.

[Mike McCormick @MikeMcCormick_]

Who wants a $250k career transition grant or a $1m pre-seed check to focus on AI control, verification, oversight?

Founder types wanted

[Suraj Sharma @suraj_sharma14]

The Bridge Residency applications are open.

If you are a non-US founder at stage 0 - pre-idea, pre-team, or just getting started apply before the deadline on August 30.

Selected founders get access to:

• $250k first check from Entrepreneurs First + support to close your first funding round
• 8-week in-person residency in San Francisco starting October 2026
• Live and build with peers who know how to distribute, grow, sell or lead
• Alumni have raised from Sequoia, Founders Fund, Benchmark, Index, a16z, Khosla
• Portfolio value: $16B+ • Notable companies: Cleo (unicorn), Aztec Network, Gensyn, PolyAI, Neptune Robotics, Magdrive
• Backed by: Patrick & John Collison (Stripe), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Eric Schmidt (Google), Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI), Nat Friedman (GitHub), Mati Staniszewski (ElevenLabs)
• Selection process: Application + short video → 2 interview rounds → Selection Days (in-person event)

Applications close August 30, 2026 • Fall 2026 cohort • San Francisco

Apply here: https://t.co/O6e2y8xK5S
@jointhebridge

[Martin Tobias (Pre-Seed VC) @MartinGTobias]

I write $500K checks into companies that don't exist yet.

most people think I'm betting on ideas.

I'm not.

I'm betting on people who refuse to accept the world as it is.

[Nick Kuhn @tehkuhnz]

Claude sonnet5 level ✅
Runs on a single dgx spark or Blackwell pro ✅
American lab 🇺🇸
@poolsideai sweet name ✅

Really excited at giving this model a try 😎

[1752vc @1752vc]

36+ VC Funds For Early-Stage Founders

@1752vc — Generalist
@lateralcap — Fintech; Climate
@FintechV — Fintech; Insurtech; Proptech
@FoundationCap — Fintech; Enterprise; AI
@firstcirclecap — Fintech; Insurtech; SaaS
Group 11 — Fintech; AI; Insurtech
First Check Ventures — Fintech; SaaS; Ecommerce
@EmbeddedCap — Fintech; Web3 / Crypto; SaaS
@anafricanfuture — Fintech; Logistics; Food & Ag
Exponent — Fintech; Enterprise; AI
@FourAcresVC — Fintech; Health; SaaS
Goodwell Investments — Fintech; Food & Ag; Logistics
@finventurecap — Fintech; SaaS; AI
@gilgameshvc — Fintech; Insurtech; Marketplaces
@ECHOVC — Fintech; Marketplaces; Health
@indiaquotient — Fintech; SaaS; CPG / D2C
@Flat6Labs — Fintech; Health; Ecommerce
@HarlemCapital — Fintech; Ecommerce; Enterprise
@GoldenGateVC — Fintech; Marketplaces; SaaS
@generalistcap — Fintech; SaaS; Web3 / Crypto
Fitch Ventures — Fintech; Data; AI
@gfc_sea — Fintech; Ecommerce; SaaS
@firstcheckHQ — Fintech; Ecommerce; Health
@illuminatefm — Fintech; Web3 / Crypto; AI
@fintech_io — Fintech; Insurtech; Web3 / Crypto
@H20Capital — Fintech; Ecommerce; SaaS
@FuelVC — Fintech; Consumer; AI
@GoldenPalmVC — Fintech; Health; Marketplaces
@impact_46 — Fintech; Ecommerce; SaaS
@flourishVC — Fintech; Insurtech; Food & Ag
@EmiratesNBD_AE — Fintech; AI; Enterprise
@ia_fund — Fintech; Health; Education
@graphventures — Fintech; Ecommerce; Marketplaces
@elevarequity — Fintech; Education; Health
Flucas Ventures — Fintech; AI; Health
K50 Ventures — Fintech; Health; Future of Work
@HummingbirdVC — Fintech; Biotech; SaaS

[Francis Santora 🎌 @FrancisPSantora]

I saw a founder raise $5 million with a 7 slide deck. Here’s how you can do it too…

1. Title
2. One sentence vision
3. Team
4. Traction
5. Market size
6. Competitors
7. Ask

Short decks raise more money, not less.

[Andrew Yeung @andruyeung]

Books every 30-year-old should read:

- Die With Zero by Bill Perkins
- The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
- The Power Broker by Robert Caro
- The Five Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom
- The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway
- When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
- The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
- The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga

[Rob Hallam @robj3d3]

If you wanna do it yourself, this is how:

Buy (~15 min)
1. Cheap VPS from Hetzner or DigitalOcean (~€5-10/mo), Ubuntu 24.04, tick automatic backups at checkout
2. Add your domain to Cloudflare (free plan), switch nameservers at your registrar
3. Install Termius (SSH app) + Tailscale (private network) on laptop and phone, free tiers

Lock it down (~20 min)
4. Generate an SSH key in Termius, add it to the VPS at creation. Keys only, never passwords
5. SSH in once via public IP, run updates, install Tailscale on the server, log it in
6. Disable Tailscale key expiry for the server (admin console, one click)
7. Verify you can SSH via the server's Tailscale 100.x address BEFORE the next step
8. Provider firewall: delete all inbound rules, allow only port 443 from Cloudflare's published IP ranges. No public SSH at all. You enter through the tunnel
9. Test from outside: public IP times out on everything, Tailscale IP connects. Server is now invisible
10. One SSH key per device. Phone gets its own key added to authorized_keys

Install the brain (~5 min)
11. apt install tmux then install Claude Code (official native installer, one curl command)
12. Run Claude Code inside a tmux session so it survives disconnects and keeps working while your laptop is closed

Hand over everything else
13. Write ONE long handover prompt telling Claude Code: the server facts, the security model (so it doesn't "fix" it), folder conventions (/srv/http/domain per project, one tmux session each), your preferences, and standing rules (confirm before destructive actions, new services bind to localhost/Tailscale only)
14. Make it write all of that into CLAUDE.md first, so every future session already knows everything
15. Backups before features: nightly job pushing your data to GitHub, tested, before a single page exists
16. Then let it install the web server (Caddy + Cloudflare DNS plugin plays nicest with the locked firewall), set up SQLite, deploy the first page

From then on you never administer the server again.

You open Termius from anywhere, on any device, and just say what you want.

BOSH

[Alejo @ecommartinez]

10 repositorios de GitHub para scrapear todo internet

Guárdalos todos. Cada uno extrae datos limpios de cualquier web. Ese nivel de acceso normalmente exige llamadas de ventas y contratos.

[Finn Mallery @fin465]

We went from 0 to 1,000+ paid customers in our first 20 weeks by religiously following these @ycombinator 12 rules:

1/ grow retention before growth. we didn't run a single growth campaign until we hit 90% weekly retention. scaling a leaky bucket just means you fail faster

2/ ignore everyone who isn't your customer. i stopped reading competitor blogs, industry news, and most of twitter. the only company that can kill you in year one is your own

3/ manual is faster than perfect. our first 50 users each got a personal onboarding call from me. you can't automate what you don't understand yet

4/ validate before you build. we put a credit card gate on @origamichat on day 2. it's easy to convince yourself people want your product when nobody's paying

5/ ugly product > no product. we shipped a barely-working version to 30 people in a week. real users teach you more in 7 days than 6 months of polishing in the dark

6/ your customers write your roadmap. i still spend 3 hours a day on user calls. every feature we've shipped came from a conversation, not a planning session

7/ fire bad fits early. we've fired customers who were wrong for our product. 10 people who love you beat 1,000 who kind of like you. every time

8/ ship every week without exception. we push code to production every friday. consistency compounds in ways you can't see at first

9/ stay small longer than feels comfortable. we were 2 people for a very longtime. Headcount is not progress. every great startup was embarrassingly small for embarrassingly long

10/ know your burn, know your runway. we track default alive on a whiteboard every week. scary but necessary. most startups don't die from the market, they die from running out of time

11/ expect things to break constantly. we've had 3 near-death moments. the game isn't avoiding fires, it's how fast you put them out

12/ honest conflict > polite silence. brutal honesty with your cofounder is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy

good luck and dont forget to have fun

[Claude @claudeai]

The Claude Security plugin for Claude Code is now available in beta.

Scan your changes for vulnerabilities before you commit, or run a full scan across your codebase, all from your terminal on the Claude inference you already run.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

AI is moving into the physical world.

We're excited about a new wave of startups rebuilding the systems that power the real world, from education and healthcare to defense, finance, infrastructure, and work itself.

https://t.co/QCIz6DnQnN

[Monid @monid_ai]

We just killed Crunchbase.

Introducing Claude for private market data. Your agent can now read 20M+ private companies.

Crunchbase: $2400/year.
Us: $0.125 per request.

Made possible by @akta_pro × @monid_ai.

[Finn Mallery @fin465]

My AI startup Origami scaled to $50k/month before we built a product at all

(before doing this, I spent 3 years starting / failing companies)

what finally worked was a "dirty trick" I think everyone should do: sell before you build.

Here's exactly how you do it:

STEP 1: Stop building product-first. It's what makes people keep failing.

For 3 years my process was always the same: figure out what the market needs, build the perfect product, then go sell it.

It got me nowhere.

In college I built loyalty apps for restaurants because "obviously" a restaurant wants one.

But when I finally knocked on doors, owners told me no, and if they hadn't adopted one already, there was a reason.

I wish I'd talked to 20 restaurant owners before writing a line of code instead of after.

STEP 2: You don't need a product. Solve the problem manually first.

Before this I ran an agency booking sales meetings for businesses by hand.

It showed me the real insight: I could sell the automated version of that work before it existed.

So I called my best friend studying in the UK: go all-in with me

Then I started pitching businesses on software that finds customers for them

(this eventually turned into Origami, tag me @origamichat), but at the time we hadn't built a thing.

"How much would you pay to have this?"

The answers: $500/mo, $1,000/mo. Some even said $4-5k/mo.

STEP 3: The Risk-Free Offer.

If you can deliver an outcome a business genuinely wants and put yourself on the hook for it, saying no is irrational. Whatever you're selling, price it on the result:

"Free if it doesn't work."
"You don't pay until we hit X."
"Full refund if we don't deliver."

Whether you're promising more revenue, lower churn, saved hours, or a problem finally fixed, businesses spend millions chasing those outcomes.

Tie your pay to the result and a small cut is nothing to them.

You don't need case studies or logos yet, you just need to take the fear off the table.

(Once you've built a reputation, you drop the guarantees and charge more)

STEP 4: Deliver by hand, and let demand become your leverage.

During the day I took an absurd number of calls: 15 meetings a day, 7 days a week, ~150 a week, while my co-founder built at night.

In our first 2 months we booked over $50k/month in revenue from interested clients. Then the start date came and we had no product. So I just did the job by hand:

Built spreadsheets of the best leads for each client.
Sent high-quality leads every week, guaranteed.

That booked demand was everything.

It let us recruit a team, raise money, and our first 3 customers even angel invested in us (that we met through cold email).

They literally sent money so we could build the product they wanted.

By month 3-4, we had turned booked rev into ~$70k/month actually flowing through Stripe.

STEP 5: In 2026, building isn't the bottleneck. Knowing what to build is.

We didn't get here because we were great engineers. If we'd tried to build first, we'd have been screwed.

I'd rather have 50 interested customers and vibe-code something, knowing exactly what they want, than a team of 10 IOI medalist engineers serving one half-interested customer.

Models like Claude Fable already build better than the best human engineers

Our product only came together because clients kept shouting at us:

"these leads are bad"
"automate our emailing"
"scrape google maps too"
"add ecommerce stores.”
etc.

that's the roadmap

So pitch people something that doesn't exist yet

if you found this useful, save it and PLEASE use it to to land customers🙏. ill be writing more detailed growth guides every week

[Andrew Weir @TheCodingKid]

A few months ago, I tried to build my first iMessage agent and found out it would cost $1,000 upfront for the platform, $750 upfront for a phone number, and $250/month after that.

That was one of the craziest pricing models I’d ever seen.

So Cale and I built Comms. It does the same thing for $50 a month. That’s it.

[Niko Ludwig @Collateral_com]

Revolut in 2015: 4,800 users asking for $2.3M.

Revolut today: $75B and 70 million customers.

Here's their seed deck:

[1752vc @1752vc]

35+ AI VC Funds For Early-Stage Founders

@1752vc — Generalist
@uphonestcapital — AI; Biotech; Consumer
@toyota_ventures — AI; Climate; Robotics
@ycombinator — AI; SaaS; Devtools
Z Venture Capital — AI; Fintech; Ecommerce
@ViolaGroup — AI; Fintech; Enterprise
@zettaventures — AI; Data; Enterprise
@UnderlineVC — AI; SaaS; Enterprise
@TSVCap — AI; Health; Fintech
@Wellington_Mgmt — AI; Fintech; Health
@e14fund — AI; Biotech; Robotics
@CouncilAngel1 — AI; Health; Fintech
Ten VC — AI; SaaS
@WatertowerVC — AI; SaaS; Fintech
@Unusual_VC — AI; Devtools; Cybersecurity
@TrailynVc — AI; Web3 / Crypto; Deeptech / Hardware
@TLV_Partners — AI; Cybersecurity; Fintech
The New Normal Fund — AI; SaaS; Enterprise
@yesvc — AI; Climate; Consumer
@Techstars — AI; Fintech; Health
@zhenfund — AI; Consumer; Transportation
Underdog Labs — AI; SaaS; Consumer
@valiaventures — AI; Health; Deeptech / Hardware
@UnshackledVC — AI; SaaS; Fintech
@vanedgecapital — AI; Cybersecurity; Data
Tango vc — AI; Robotics; Deeptech / Hardware
@untappedvc — AI; Under-represented founders; Enterprise
@trueventures — AI; Biotech; Climate
@ThriveCapital — AI; Fintech; Health
@weekendfund — AI; Fintech; Health
@TriatomicCap — AI; Biotech
@TypeOneVC — AI; Deeptech / Hardware
@twosigmavc — AI; Data; Enterprise
Twine Ventures — AI; Health; Climate

[Dave Kline @dklineii]

Every CEO I coach asks me some version of the same question.

"How do I find A-players who make sh!t happen?"

At Bridgewater, I ran hundreds of interviews looking for this exact thing. We called it "acting like an owner." Others call it high agency. Here are 5 tests to find it:

[0xMarioNawfal @RoundtableSpace]

Everyone wants to try Kimi K3 but nobody wants to rebuild their entire setup to do it. Moonshot just solved that.

They now sponsor claude-code-router, which means your existing terminal, hooks and CLAUDE.md stay exactly as they are, and Kimi K3 plugs in with one click.

→ Built-in Kimi presets let you import via API or Kimi Code subscription instantly
→ Subscription requests pass through natively with zero protocol conversion
→ Your Kimi balance and usage show up right in the router dashboard
→ Automatic failover kicks in when a provider goes down mid-session
→ K3's cache pricing handles repeated context at $0.30 per million tokens

One thing worth knowing: proxy mode installs a root certificate, so skip that toggle unless you know why you need it. The default setup doesn't touch it.

[Zeno Rocha @zenorocha]

Resend just crossed 2x the downloads of SendGrid.

SendGrid sold to Twilio for $3 billion.

never underestimate a small team.

https://t.co/HWWduYHYq5